Helmut came forward and sat on the fourth side of the table on the other corner of the bale on which I was sitting. He rubbed his wrists.
Tom Cooper picked up a straw, and handed it to him.
‘Just in case you don’t know how to go about it,’ he said, ‘if you vote for the proposition, you put the straw into the hat unbroken. If you vote against it, you snap the straw with your thumb as you put it in.’
‘The secret ballot,’ Helmut said.
‘That’s right – the weapon of democracy.’
‘Without which neither the Star Chamber, the Spanish Inquisition, nor even Nazism could have begun.’
‘I could give you a quotation about motes and beams,’ Tom Cooper said, easily, ‘but I haven’t been reading the Bible much of late.’
He put the hat, folded, onto the table. With his left hand he drew it towards him, and then put in his straw. He passed the hat to me, and I put in my straw. I passed the hat to Helmut, and he put his hand inside it, containing his straw.
‘Let me make certain of this,’ he said. ‘If I leave the straw in here intact, it means you will kill me. If I break it, it means you will try to take me back with you.’
‘That’s right,’ Tom Cooper said. ‘The proposition on which we are voting is, shall I kill you.’
Helmut withdrew his hand, then gave the hat to Cliff. Cliff blatantly held his straw between the tip of his thumb and his finger, at the end, and dropped it into the beret, unbroken, with no attempt at concealment. He smiled at Helmut while he did this, a supreme gesture of dumb insolence.
He handed the hat back to Helmut, who took it still folded, in both hands.
‘Now tip it over,’ he said, ‘and shake the straws onto the tabletop.’
Helmut slowly did so, and then withdrew the beret to reveal them.
Three were broken, one was unbroken.
I looked quickly at Tom Cooper, and saw him look at Helmut.
‘The one thing about democracy,’ Helmut said, blandly, ‘is that it can be adapted to meet any situation.’
I was almost stunned with admiration for him. He had beaten us fairly and squarely again. I had put my straw in unbroken. Regretfully, I had decided to take my chance on getting through our lines without him to help me. I was also quite certain that Tom Cooper had decided to do the same thing. But, in keeping his hand inside the hat, Helmut had taken the opportunity to break both my straw and that belonging to Tom Cooper.
Already he understood that Tom Cooper would not go back on the ballot, would not destroy what he believed in, the right of a man to express his thoughts, without fear, in private.
He knew Tom Cooper to be incapable of revealing how he had voted, or of asking me how I had voted. Of course, he was taking a chance – a chance that Cliff might rebel and shoot him out of hand. He was also taking a chance that I would volunteer the information for which Tom Cooper couldn’t ask me.
Tom Cooper turned to look at me.
I didn’t speak.
‘It would seem we all try to get back together,’ he said.
‘So it would seem,’ I said.
Cliff was furious with Tom Cooper and with me. He had not guessed what the German had done, or would certainly have killed him. I knew this feeling would not last. Cliff would accept the German’s presence among us once we had started to make preparations for getting back.
‘What about some grub?’ Tom Cooper asked him. He knew the way to make Cliff forget. Cliff got up and started to take tins of stew from his rucksack.
Tom Cooper got out his tool kit, and soon had the breech out of his rifle and had started to clean it. He worked slowly and methodically, looking every so often to where Helmut and I were still sitting at the table. Helmut had been trying to adjust his bandage more comfortably. I brought a mug of water, and washed some of the caked blood from his chin. When I had cleaned it, I offered him a cigarette. He accepted it. I took the matches out of my pocket.
‘Is it safe to smoke?’ I asked him.
‘You never give up, do you?’ he asked me, smiling.
‘I thought you might like to pay for your passage.’
‘With information?’
‘What else?’
Tom Cooper had stopped cleaning his rifle, and sat holding it across his knees.
There was a sudden silence in the barn. It was a silence that came not from the absence of noise – for we had maintained that kind of silence during our entire occupation. It was the heavy silence of anticipation, the clarifying silence that increases hearing and vision, heightens comprehension.
‘There’s no need to watch that hill,’ he said. ‘When the attack comes it will come from somewhere quite different.’
‘Then what were you three doing?’
As soon as I had asked, I could have wished to recapture the ‘you three’ and lock it back in my conscience.
‘I mean…’
‘I know what you mean,’ he said, with the first trace of kindness I had heard him utter. ‘You mean, what was I doing? I came to give myself up.’
There it was. I tried to force my mind away from the knowledge of what the other two Germans were doing, what their hopes and intentions were. But thoughts and the knowledge they bring are instantaneous in the mental process.
‘You may ask,’ he said, ‘why I tried to surrender in such a dramatic fashion, and I will tell you. I didn’t particularly want to give myself up as a positive act of coming over to your side – I wanted to give myself, up to dissociate myself from our side. Do you know what I mean? I was a man who grows disgusted with his present, who walks out into limbo to think about the future. The vagrant who is not yet ready to look again at life to find if it can be acceptable to him. I knew I couldn’t find that limbo on my own, because there is no physical place where a man can put himself between the two forces we once represented. And as I watched you and him engaging in horseplay, it seemed to me that here in the very centre of this cataclysm, was what could be a limbo. This could be a pausing point, a breathing space between two… conflagrations.’ He had looked for the word in his memory, not wanting to use the ordinary word we used in thoughts of our situation.
I knew exactly what he meant. I had had exactly these feelings about our barn, but had had no cause, nor would have had the ability, to express them.
‘The vital thing I had to do, however,’ he said, ‘was to preserve the situation within this barn as it was. I knew my arrival could cause the conflagration to occur here, within these four walls. But if I could take command of the situation, I could at least control the rate of it.’
Tom Cooper and I both knew he was right. Had we been able, we would have ended his ‘limbo’ as he called it, just as I had ended the search of his two compatriots.
‘For what reason did you want to “dissociate yourself from your side” – I believe that was the phrase you used?’ Tom Cooper asked.
‘A very simple one,’ Helmut said. ‘I am a perfectionist. I cannot tolerate inefficient people. My unit had become inefficient!’
It was as simple as that for him. Plus A equals efficiency, minus A equals nothing.
A sudden chill had come to the inside of the barn, and the heat of the day was over.
It was the start of one of those long European evenings, evenings made for bicycling through the quiet French countryside seeking the best of many samples of vins du pays. It was an evening for dressing in a soft suit, as pleasurable after cardboard khaki as is your chin after a barber’s shop shave. It was an evening for holding, in the woolly cardigan sleeve, the long arm of a well-scrubbed girl, or for drowsing on a haystack with a black-haired, hard-nippled, pouting, reluctant hiker. For gins and tonics and lemonade shandies. For MG motor cars, or for pottering about in the sand of a north-eastern beach at ebb tide, looking for rock crabs and coloured sea shells. It was an evening for being with someone you had known all your life, for a slow, comfortable journey to someone dear to you.
It was light in the barn, as if the inner walls had stored the light as well as the heat from the day’s bright sun.
I walked across to the door, without fear. I could believe Helmut that no one could be near. I looked out across the fields.
Two men lay dead out there, and I had killed them. So what?
The song of the moment, the last time I had been able to listen to a song, had been, ‘You can stop me from holding hands, make me listen to your commands, you can say “no – no”, honey, that’s all right, I’ll get even with you tonight, ’cause you can’t stop me from dreaming.’ I’d heard it played bravely in a blacked-out ballroom, last time I was in London, sung wistfully if somewhat tunelessly by the dance-band singer, a frightened young girl destined to dream for a while of a rich paradise, and to awaken too soon in a chromium-plated series of semi-detached pregnancies.
I had hummed the song all the way through when I became conscious of the sound coming involuntarily from me, the ridiculous, meaningless words that comforted me with their banality.
Cliff had prepared supper. It was our well-tried favourite, M and V stew, to which he had added strips of bacon from our emergency rations. He had crumbled into it oatmeal biscuits to give it body, and had then poured in a large measure of the cognac he seemed never to be without. He kept it in a silver flask looted from a Dutch house – his ‘glint’, he called it.
He had not set the table. He had cooked in a large copper jam-making pot we had found in the barn, and brought this steaming to the table on which our mess tins had been piled. There was even a place for Helmut, so quickly and completely could Cliff accept the inevitable.
Cliff ladled portions of his ‘Bœuf militaire’, as he called it, into each of four of the mess tins and set them on the top of the packing-case table. Each took his place at the tableside, Helmut glancing at us for a lead. Neither Tom Cooper nor I started. Cliff took his seat, and then, his hands crossed, he bent his head and recited slowly, with meaning, ‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ There was a silence of many seconds.
‘One of these days,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘one of you bastards is going to have the decency to say “Amen”.’
Helmut didn’t think anyone had noticed his hands locked beneath the edge of the packing-case, nor did he know I had seen his lips frame an ‘Amen’, though the word remained inaudible.
I had never seen Cliff, born and bred a complex Baptist, eat anything approaching a meal without calling for a Blessing – not a biscuit, nor even a bar of chocolate when chocolate, as it so often did, replaced food.
Helmut showed none of his former sneering superiority – he did not seem surprised by Cliff’s devotions. He had instinctively become one of us, and I for my part was glad to accept him as such. There was no risk of being caught off guard by him. I knew that however close we might become, I would still be prepared for combat, with him or anyone else, should the need arise. This I could do because it involved no need to adopt a placatory approach, and thus no weakening of my intent. I was prepared to accept him, but not to woo him by the surrender of any of those rampant principles of kill-or-be-killed, the quick-or-the-dead, with which we had constantly been stimulated since our first acceptance of the military mind and purpose. Rather did I now perceive that total war need not be the total constant preoccupation of each individual. Trained, equipped, and prepared as ever to destroy my enemies by any of a dozen effective methods, I could accept that, for the present time, the ebb and flow of combat had washed by us, and that we could float for a while in the quiet shallows of some turbulent sea whose waves, crashing at a distance, would be spent before they could reach us. In these circumstances, any personal antagonism would seem purposeless. Any antagonism would have stemmed from personal relationships I was anxious to avoid, from the recognition of conjoint humanity, from his acceptance by me as a human being. This I was not prepared to do. I dare not do, if truth be told.
The meal ended as it had begun, in silence. I took all the mess tins to a vat of water near the door, a rain butt we would have called it in England though its shape was more vat than butt, and scoured each one clean with rough dust from the beaten earth of the barn floor.
Helmut offered to help me, but Tom Cooper made him sit down and attended to his bandage. He redusted the wound with sulphanilamide powder, and changed the field dressing, washing the wound carefully with boiled water. Helmut seemed in good spirits, though he flinched when Tom Cooper was compelled to tear the last bit of lint from the congealed blood on his face.
Cliff was busy striking camp, packing our rucksacks and preparing our equipment for the night trek.
When I had finished washing the pots, I ran my hand over my bristling chin and decided to shave. The water in the vat was cold, but soft enough to give an instant lather when I rubbed my chin with a speck of soap I had managed to preserve. It was that same block of sweet-smelling transparent brown soap – had been given to me as a parting gift by a young girl who lived a wartime life of generous but lonely sin in a block of flats near Regent’s Park. The blade pulled, but I was used to that. I remember hoping, as I slipped it into my razor, that using it for shaving wouldn’t blunt its weapon edge.
We finished our self-appointed tasks simultaneously, strapped our rucksacks onto our backs, Helmut wearing his odd-looking goatskin pannier with the hair facing outward, and Tom Cooper led the way out of the barn. I was last out, Helmut walking before me, and behind Cliff. We walked across the corner of the field in the path taken each morning by the sergeant, and then turned the hedge as he had done, and went over the crest of yet another field. A whole valley lay revealed to us, a long, gently sloping field, a scrub wood, another field, a proper wood, then the other bank of the valley rising away to the near horizon. There were no signs of activity in the valley, though I had not expected to find any. I seemed to remember, on the night we had been brought from our position, that we had walked along the edge of a valley, just beneath one of the lips, before we had turned right to come to the field in which was the barn.
We turned left, along the top of the hedgerow, and across the edge of what had, oddly enough, at one time been a ploughed field. There appeared to be little arable farming in these parts, though I would have thought the ground rich enough to support a crop. Rather was the land devoted to stock-rearing – each field had the well-manured and cropped look of constant grazing. There was no sign of stock now, however. I imagined that any animals had been taken to the regional abattoirs as shortages of meat became – as had been reported – more and more acute. The three chickens we had eaten that day must have been part of someone’s private hoard, though there had been no sign of their owner.
The farmhouse was round the corner of the hedge. Tom Cooper saw it first, and motioned each one of us to get down and remain still. I remembered seeing a farmhouse on our way there, but couldn’t have said exactly where it was. I crawled along to the end of the hedge, and looked round. The farmhouse was no more than a quarter mile away, set in an open ring of one-storey farm buildings, with a stockyard in front of it, and a pond. Behind it a small wood gave protection from the winds. At the first glance I saw the rifle sticking out of the upstairs window, pointing more or less in our direction.
Other than the rifle, and a thin wisp of smoke coming from the chimney, there were no signs of activity. Tom Cooper beckoned Helmut forward. There was no need to caution him, his movement imperceptible to any but us.
‘What kind of rifle is that?’ Tom Cooper asked. It had a shorter barrel than any I had seen.
Not that I had even seen a rifle held in German hands before, other than the three I had seen that day.
Helmut took back his glasses from Tom Cooper and, shielding the front with his hands to avoid reflections, used them to scan that open window.
‘Parachutists,’ he said. ‘Parachutists.’
Men after our own style. Daredevils, with their own ideas of discipline, tough, longshanked bastards, each one of them.
‘That’s the short rifle only they have.’
Why couldn’t the men in there be detachments of inefficient Pioneer Corps ditch-diggers…
That’s it, I thought, and started to look for some way of circumnavigating the field without exposing ourselves to sight and fire from that upstairs window.
I had plotted a route in my mind, and was starting to outline it to Tom Cooper, when I saw the look on Cliff’s face, and stopped.
‘There might be a Luger in there,’ he said.
Cliff was obsessed with the thoughts of that Luger – the one souvenir he wanted.
‘Well, go in and get it,’ I said.
For the first time it occurred to him that perhaps we were not going to go into the farmhouse. He turned to Tom Cooper, looking incredulous.
‘We’re going in there, aren’t we?’ he asked. There was a boyish note of pleading in his voice – a boy who had been brought all the way to the fun fair and then told he couldn’t go on the Big Dipper, and didn’t believe it when he was told ‘No’.
‘I don’t know,’ Tom Cooper said.
‘Well, I know,’ I interjected. ‘What’s the point of going in there? There’s nothing in the farmhouse we want, is there? Dammit, the sergeant’s been this way twice a day for the past two days, and if he wanted to go into there, he could have whistled up the boys and they could have gone in there, couldn’t they?’
‘We don’t know the sergeant has been this way,’ Cliff said, with simple truth. We didn’t, of course. Certainly, if he had, I couldn’t imagine he would leave the farmhouse, held by paratroopers, without doing something about it. I looked across the field behind me. If the sergeant had stayed to the top side of the field, he would not have seen that farmhouse. The small plume of smoke coming from the chimney dispersed about ten feet above it, and certainly would not have been visible from the top side of the field.
‘Well, when we get back, we’ll tell him,’ I said, ‘and he can send a fighting patrol out to have a look at it.’
‘That’s a load of nonsense,’ Cliff argued. ‘Here we are right on top of it. We might just as well have a look inside. If we go all that way back, and then report it, ten to one the sergeant will tell us to lead the patrol back here, and then we’ll have gone all that way for nothing!’ Simple as ever, one plus one equals eleven.
Tom Cooper and Helmut listened to this exchange, their heads swinging backwards and forwards as if they were watching a ping-pong match.
‘We ought not to leave it,’ Tom Cooper said.
‘To tell you the honest truth,’ I said, ‘I’m beyond caring what we ought or ought not to do. We have no briefing to start Errol Flynning our way over the countryside. Here’s a farmhouse – we don’t know how many of them are in it, we don’t know if it’s on our line of advance, we don’t know anything about the bloody place, and yet, just because it’s there, you want to have a crack at it. What the hell’s the matter with you two, anyway. They’re not dishing out Military Medals today, you know…’ That was a sore point with us. The number of medals our lads had received could be counted on one hand. There was never anyone about when they were earning them. So far we’d been lucky in avoiding the death or glory, the amateur mentality. We were all blasé professionals, if the truth was known. Tell one of our lads to blow a safe and he’d blow it, without even opening it when he’d blown the lock out of it, because he knew that what was in it didn’t concern him. Mind you, they had been opening safe doors since the time one of them had walked away, incuriously, from a cache of gold sovereigns and diamond brooches that had been nicked by an infantry man who’d followed them the easy way inside an armoured scout car. ‘The next thing,’ I argued – quite inconsistently, as I fully realised – ‘you’ll be wanting to go dashing back and over that hill to take the lot of them on, just for the sake of a filthy Luger or two.’
I had overdone it. I could see that by the hardening of the expression on Tom Cooper’s face, and the look of distress on Helmut’s. He didn’t want to mess about in there any more than I did, and his reasons were every bit as selfish as mine. He wanted to get back to the quiet of his limbo in a prisoner-of-war camp. More than anything else, I wanted to get back to the reassuring world of sergeants and decisive orders and radios that chirped out contacts with the great world of war behind us. I wanted to watch my chances for a fiddled trip to Brussels for some leave in the Orbin Hotel, where the prostitutes were graceful, and lined the bars each evening, and had a room booked upstairs, and for an all-inclusive fee would spend three days and nights being a lover, mother, companion and nurse to you. I wanted to get back to Naafi issue, and ‘I wonder where the next job will be’, and the chance that perhaps this time we were going to be pulled out of the line for home leave, that magically enticing phrase that was engraved on the heart of us all. I wanted a long wash, and a bath, and a sit-down shit, and bread – oh, how I longed for a slice of bread to replace the hard tack. I longed for the peace of lying back in some rest area, with all the many catnaps between meals and briefings and debriefings and new weapon instruction and watching the makeshift company notice board and waiting for the postman to bring me – a joke on someone’s part, but one I now awaited avidly for the totally disinterested preoccupation with the mundane lives of others it gave me – my monthly copy of the latest issue of the Muckshifter’s Gazette.
But from the look on Tom Cooper’s face I was not going to see the Gazette while there remained German soldiers in that farmhouse, and a menacing rifle barrel peeping out of an upstairs window.
‘How do I get in?’ I asked.
I had already worked out the route. It was going to be messy, because it would mean crawling through the corner of that blasted pond, and I could see the slime from where we sat. But the corner of the pond was hidden from that upstairs window – and we could move along the back of the outhouses, down behind a wall which became the overhanging lip of the pond, without too much danger. In more peaceful times, water must have cascaded over that lip, and the sight of it must have been a feature of the entire farm. Dammit, it would have made a change from belching and stuffing yourself with sausage and sauerkraut, and dancing improbably athletic pink fat-kneed, bulging belly-bouncing versions of ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ to the sound of the flugelhorn and glockenspiel. The thought of these bucolic pleasures restored my humour, and I set off back along the hedge. There was an almost inaudible thud behind me – when I turned round, Cliff was wiring Helmut up again, and had stuffed a rag into his mouth. Helmut, of course, was quite unconscious from one of those devastating butt-of-the-hand jabs.
The water of the pond was slimy, and it stank. Luckily I was able to keep my face out of it, but my nostrils could have been only four inches above it. The bottom was slimy, and several times my feet slid. Each time I slipped my knee would thud down into the ooze with just sufficient force to bang the puddled bottom. I was carrying my pack and my clothing in one hand, my rifle in the other. At the far side of the pond, under the shelter of a long low wall, I dressed again, but I left my pack off. From the side pockets i took four grenades, and made certain my ammunition pouches were filled. I had borrowed Helmut’s automatic rifle, and slung a bandolier of his ammunition (0.300 for the technically-minded) across my shoulders.
Cliff, of course, was livid that I was going first, but there was no question who could get in there with the least chance of being spotted. He made me promise he could have any Luger. Along the side of the wall, slowly, listening for the slightest sound of activity on the other side. I had arranged with Cliff and Tom Cooper, waiting on the far side of a fence of intertwined hazel branches, that at the first sign of me being pinned down, I would run forward, Cliff would shoot rapid and high, Tom Cooper would aim low and always before me. God grant I didn’t run too fast. Slowly along the wall, two steps and listen. Nothing. Not a sound. Two steps and listen. Not a murmur. Obviously well-disciplined troops though their reputation had gone before them and I wouldn’t expect them to fool about in there if they were manning an outpost.
Two steps and listen. Nothing. Now I was within five feet of the end of the wall, and the first barn door. I waited, every sense prickling. Not a sound from within the barn. This was a long, low cowshed, not like the barn in which we had spent the last few days, high and wide for hay and farm equipment. This was long and low, with a wide double door. The top part of the door was open, the bottom part closed, but not latched. It was held open just an inch by a stick that leaned innocently forward from the edge of the doorpost, jammed into the wood of the door at an angle of thirty degrees to the vertical. The end of the stick was newly-pointed – at the other end a piece of baling string, loosely attached, or so it seemed. The baling string went under the door, and vanished inside the cow barn. It was not stretched taut. The hinges of the barn had been greased not too long ago. The marks on the upright showed where the door had swung, and where the latch had rubbed the wood for many a year. Many farmyard doors are hung this way, off centre, to ensure the door will shut by its own weight after the beasts have gone in. But here was one beast who was not going in. Not for a king’s ransom. The point of that stick was jammed not against the door, but into it. You wouldn’t spot it at first, but the butt of the stick was not quite touching the ground. I broke off a blade of grass growing beside the corner of the door, and I could pass that blade of grass under the bottom of that stick. So that’s the way they want to play, is it? Open that door and the stick would go with it, the baling string would pull, and Phoof – away I go to a far better life stoking a furnace. Not on your nellie. I ran my fingers lightly along the stick to the top end, to where it had been stuck into the door, and gently pulled it back, making quite certain not to move the butt end or the baling string while doing so. Whoever had set it in had been, in a previous existence, a carpenter. The stick had been mortised into the door with as clean a joint as I had seen. If it hadn’t been for the carpenter’s neatness in chamfering the edges of the stick, I would never have guessed its purpose. Slowly I drew the stick out of its hole, and eased the door with my shoulder. The stick came out, neatly. I laid it down on the ground, inside the doorpost, away from Cliff’s clumsy feet. Then I propped the door open by the same amount using a piece of stone. I ran swiftly along hugging the wall, until I was level with the kitchen door.
This was another half door, but there were no signs on the outside of its having been prepared for visitors. I stood erect, with my back to the wall, and beckoned to Tom Cooper to keep a watch on the outhouses along which I had come. No one inside the building could have seen me, unless he came to an actual window and looked out. Cliff, I knew, would be watching the windows for the first sign of his Luger.
The German in the upper window was about twelve feet above my head. From where I was standing, I could have lobbed a grenade in through that window. It was unlikely, however, that all the men would be on this one side of the building, and the first explosion of a grenade would alert them all.
There is no way of getting into a house other than the cinematic, dramatic way of pushing open the door and going through it. The trick is to open the door fast, go through the opening fast, and stand at the side of the door, looking in. Whoever is inside the room will automatically look at the door as it bangs open and will be blinded momentarily by the sudden inrush of light. That moment belongs to you – and it’s all you have. Speed, however, is a better protection than all the armour plate. It’s not generally understood that it is virtually impossible to hit a man with a bullet who is running in a zigzag path across your line of flight. Many animals run in a pattern unconsciously derived from this – the bounding of an eland is a natural form of self-protection.
I went into that room with a knife. I avoided slamming the door too far back, to cause it to bang against the wall. I needed the time only speed and silence could give me. There was no one in the room. I went across it quickly, after shutting the door. It led to a corridor. There was no one in the corridor; the door of each room was open and I went into and out of each one in mounting speed. Finally I had been through all the rooms and was back again in the first room.
There was no one downstairs.
The stove was warm in the kitchen, and on it was the remains of a makeshift meal of maize and sauerkraut. Junk littered the tabletops in the room – whoever was in the house lived like a pig. I knew that would be Cliff’s immediate reaction. I opened the front of the stove. The sudden rush of air into it fanned the ashes into a small flame, though the fire appeared to have been banked down for quite a time. The maize and sauerkraut were hard in the pan.
I went back into the corridor. Two staircases led upstairs – one at the front of the farmhouse, and one at the back. Each had a half landing, and on each half landing was a large window. Good! Whoever came down either of those two staircases would be blinded momentarily by the light from the half landing window. I went to the bottom of each staircase in turn, but could hear nothing above. There was no sound of footsteps. One on guard, the rest asleep or reading?
I chose to go up the left-hand staircase. That would put me on the landing with my knife hand leading and make for an easier throw. In my left hand I held a grenade, with the pin out. I went up the inside edge of the staircase, step by step, testing each one by slowly lowering my weight onto it. No creaking. Those farmhouses, like farmhouses everywhere, were built to last by a race of responsible craftsmen. When I got to the landing, I crossed to the other side of the step, and brought my head up slowly in the actual corner by the wall. The top corridor was the counterpart of the bottom corridor, and equally deserted. The room in which I knew the parachutist on guard with the rifle to be was the first on the right. The door was open. I walked slowly along the corridor, and looked into the room through the partly opened door.
He was standing in the window, looking out. His rifle was rested against the window sill and I saw he would not be able to turn it quickly. To the left, along the corridor, a room looking the other way. No one on guard here; two figures huddled on the floor, asleep. Down the corridor, each room was empty. The silence in the house was oppressive, the air heavy and stagnant, smelling of sweating boots and the unwashed bodies of dirty men.
I went back down the corridor until I was outside the room in which the man on guard was still standing. He hadn’t moved. I went along the corridor again, and looked down the staircase into the ground floor. No one else was about. I shielded my eyes against the direct light which streamed in through the window. By now I was certain there were only the three men inside the farmhouse. Back down the corridor, rehearse my movements, take a deep breath, and then knife in the left hand, dash across the room so quickly he hasn’t time to move!
I jammed my knife left handed up under his shoulder blade and into his heart from the back. With my right hand on his right shoulder I pushed and he went straight through the open window. Without waiting to watch him land I released the handle on two grenades with the grenades held against my chest. The ‘crump’ was deadened but still sounded like a miniature cannon boom. I ran across the room, one, two, up the corridor, three, pause four, five, roll the grenades in, six dash down the corridor, seven and I was halfway down the stairwell when they exploded.
The door banged and rattled, but it stayed on its hinges. I heard the bell-like jangle as glass was shattered from the inside and fell on the paved courtyard below. I waited in the stairwell until the reverberations had ended, and then fired three shots, fast, through the window to let Tom Cooper know to come in. By the time I got there, he was inside the kitchen, up against the outside wall. Cliff was in there with him, but behind the inner door, also flat against the wall.
‘Two of ’em asleep – one on guard in the window.’ I was panting with suppressed excitement, but the act of success no longer had any meaning for me. I knew now what a soldier feels like. Up to this day, I had been a full-grown Boy Scout, winning badges for proficiency, for daring, for stamina, for the automatic courage that comes with training. Now I was a hardened war criminal, with a built-in absolution. Now I was sufficiently proficient to forget about the lesson and the method. Suddenly all my training, all my peak condition, all the things I could do with my hand and my arm and my legs and my eye, all became forgettable, not worthy of mention.
Cliff was already on his way upstairs, looking for the Luger. Tom Cooper went outside, to examine the man I’d pushed through the window. I cleared a corner of the kitchen table and sat down and took out my cigarette tin. I still had fifteen cigarettes in there, and about a half an ounce of cigarette tobacco, and a half packet of Rizla papers. I rolled a cigarette in the palm of my hand, licked the cigarette paper edge, tore off the trailing tobacco ends, lit up, and began a slow, luxurious smoke.
They both shouted simultaneously, Cliff and Tom Cooper. I didn’t know whether to go upstairs to Cliff or outside to Tom Cooper. They both came pounding into the kitchen. Tom Cooper was shocked – Cliff derisive.
‘He was dead!’ Tom Cooper said.
I eyed him, uncomprehendingly.
‘So were those two buggers upstairs,’ Cliff said, contemptuously, ‘and for a damned long time to judge by the smell.’
I didn’t understand.
I went racing out of the kitchen to where the man at the window lay in a crumpled heap on the courtyard paving stones. I turned his shoulder. He had been dead for at least two or three days. There was a fly in his mouth. His face was putty grey. There was a stain of dried blood on the front of his tunic. He’d been killed by bombing, several days ago. Like the stick, he’d been propped into position to slow the advance of our troops. I dashed to the cow barn, flung open the door. The end of the baling string finished aimlessly in a pile of maize, with no signs of a booby-trap. The edges of the stick had been chamfered deliberately, to make whoever happened across it to think it was the start of a lethal weapon.
From inside the farmhouse I heard Cliff’s raucous laugh. I went back inside.
‘And what’s more,’ he said, ‘not a sign of a bloody Luger anywhere.’
We searched the farmhouse room by room, then the barns. There was no fresh food anywhere, no clothing, no drink. In one of the bedrooms were signs of occupation by a young girl – a photograph lying face down on the dresser top showing a young girl, a fat farmer figure in a Tyrolean hat, a fat farmer’s wife wearing a flowered dress, all taken standing against the wall at the back of the farmhouse. In the corner of the young girl’s room a cross had been hanging against the wall, and the paper was unbleached beneath what had been its outline. There were several small pots on the marble slab on the table beneath, and candle wax down the side of one of them. Along a painted panel behind the pots was a devotional tableau, with a Madonna and Child in the centre. The paint and gilt on the panel had been chipped, but an attempt had been made to touch them in with what looked like water paint. There was a runner along the tabletop, embroidered at each end, with words worked into the embroidery. It was in German script and I could only read the words ‘Gott’ and ‘Uns’. On the wall beside where the cross had been was a framed picture containing a painted scroll and the words ‘Vater unser’, followed by more writing I could not decipher. The picture was only about four inches by three inches. I took it from the wall and smashed the glass on the foot of the bed. I shook out the glass fragments, pulled out the paper, and put it in my breast pocket. It wasn’t a Luger, but it would do! Downstairs, Cliff and Tom Cooper were still in the kitchen, Cliff standing beside the table.
‘Dirty pigs,’ he said, and indicated with his arm the mess on the tabletop. His hand was clenched.
He shook it as if it contained dice, and then flicked it over the clean part of the table.
‘How’s that?’ he said.
On the tabletop lay three gold nuggets.
‘What are they?’ I asked, with quickening interest.
‘Gold teeth,’ he said. ‘One of those two upstairs.’
‘You filthy, lousy, stinking sod,’ I said, and went into him. I was blind with disgust and rage. The butt of his hand caught me across the chin, beneath my mouth, and I went backwards, banging the wall with my back. It felt as if my skull had been knocked off the top of my spine. I couldn’t hear anything, nor could I see for the sudden tears in my eyes. I shook my head to clear them, and then went in again.
This time I crabbed in forwards and sideways so that he couldn’t do it again. He swung his weight slightly forwards and I knew he was going to kick when I was within reach. I brought up my hands level with my neck, thumbs pointing to the rear, the heel of the hand hard and straight. It was my intention to kill him. I think he knew it. I saw the mockery go out of his eyes as he realised, and saw the fear that replaced it. He took his weight backwards off the balls of his feet. He knew he could chop one hand aside, but not the other, not both of them. I knew it too, and I didn’t care, I was past caring. Because of him and his lust for a Luger we had come into that farmhouse, and I had been prepared to risk my life, though I was not to know there was no danger within. I had killed three men already dead, killed them again, brought back their cadavers from beyond the death and knifed and bombed them over again. All he could do was carry lust into the base pit of animal acquisitiveness.
He feinted forward, and to the left, to draw me that way, then started to turn around to trap one of my arms and try in desperation to throw me over his shoulder. It was a desperate measure, but it didn’t stand a chance of working. I had resisted that one so many times! I would simply shift my weight to the right, and bend my knees and then chop at the base of his skull where it goes into the spine top and possibly break his neck.
But before I had had time to start the sequence, Tom Cooper, standing behind me, hit me on the neck and the back of the knee simultaneously and I felt myself falling over backwards into unconsciousness. When I awoke, they had carried me out of the farmhouse, and up the side of the field. The first thing I noticed was the plume of smoke coming more strongly from the chimney stack above the farmhouse, and Cliff pouring his brandy from his glint flask into my mouth. I came to. He watched me warily. Tom Cooper was watching me closely, too.
‘Try that again,’ he said, ‘and I’ll break one of your fingers.’ He would, too!
When I was in good order again, we got to our feet and climbed up the field to where we had left Helmut.
He had been waiting for our return, though afraid we would not make it. He had tried to unfasten the piano wire, and to free himself from the base of the bush to which Cliff had tied him. The bush had been torn half out of the ground and his wrists were raw where the wire had cut into them under the strain. He would have released himself in a few hours, but that bush would have gone with him wherever he went. We clipped him free.
‘What did you find in there?’ he started to ask.
‘Shut up,’ Tom Cooper said.
Helmut looked at me, and at Cliff, and then started to speak again.
‘Shut… up’, Tom Cooper said. There was no mistaking the lethal tone of his voice.
We climbed in Indian file up the field, until we were just below the crest of the hill. Then we walked slowly along to the left, and through a small copse of beech-like trees. In the copse we found the remains of bombing, a machine gun emplacement, and a fresh grave. On the grave was a German soldier’s helmet. Sprigs of some flowering bush had been stuck into the grass to make a cross for the grave, though the flowers had begun to shrivel.
At least this man had a friend when he died, had one particular individual who cared enough to bury him, and tend his grave, and lay out his helmet in respect. I stood looking at it. Cliff drew level with the grave, saw what I saw, and punched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘You’d do the same for me, you bastard,’ he said. He was right.
Outside the copse, we turned right, and walked slowly along the hedge bottom towards the small hillock which formed the shoulder of the valley. At the crest of the hillock, just before we would have appeared head and shoulders on the skyline, Tom Cooper dropped to the ground. We followed him, and then we crawled, each one taking a position behind and equally to the left of the one before him, to extend the target area and minimise the risk of being hit by a bullet aimed into the centre of the group.
I was about eight feet behind and to the left of Helmut. I watched the way he crawled totally snakelike through the grass, with an economy of movement I had never been able to achieve. I guessed that most of the work was being done by his chest muscles, his style of progress being not dissimilar to the slowed-down movements of the swimming crawl. It was most effective, and I could see that often, without even rippling the grass, he had to pause presumably to keep his distance behind Cliff. I could not see either Tom Cooper, or Cliff, in the ten-inch high grass, without lifting my head dangerously. After a while, I stopped lifting it and relied on Helmut keeping his distance from Cliff, and me keeping my distance from Helmut.
We made quick progress, but it still took a half-hour to cross that field. When, finally, we reached the hedge, and each one got his knees under the cover of the hedgerow, I noticed that Helmut had allowed the distance between himself and Cliff to grow to at least twenty feet.
I crawled to him, and rose beside him, sitting back on my haunches. He reached into his pocket and drew out four sweets, of the boiled barley sugar type. He gave one to each of us. Despite ourselves, each of us watched him pop his into his mouth before starting to eat ours. The one I had tasted strongly of lemon essence, the artificial flavouring of fizzy powder rather than the tangy taste of the real fruit. But the saliva it caused to flow was welcome and refreshing.
‘You ought not to get so far behind the one in front,’ I chided him, ‘I’ve seen men lost like that!’
‘Sorry,’ Helmut said. ‘We work on a distance of ten metres.’
Looking through the hedgerow, it became apparent we had mistaken the nature of the ground, and were still hidden behind a fold running about a hundred and fifty yards in front of us, from left to right.
I could also see, from the expression on Cliff’s face, that he had had time to reconsider the question of Helmut’s presence, and was troubled by it. The look he gave him no longer had the air of acceptance, however reluctant – rather was he asking again, ‘What’s wrong with us, that we let ourselves be taken in by this man?’
I glanced at Helmut. He too had noticed the change in the atmosphere.
Tom Cooper was looking out over the field. He turned round quickly. ‘Wait here,’ he said, and in a half run he went as far as he could, then dropped to the ground and squirmed forward, until he could see over the top of the fold before us. He lay there quite still.
Cliff watched him go, then came and sat beside me.
‘You know, we could be making a rich old mistake with this sod,’ he said, indicating Helmut.
‘What sort of a mistake?’ Helmut, of course, knew what we were saying, though Cliff’s whisper could not have been audible to him.
‘You know, we only have your guess, and then his word, that he wants to give himself up. And then, he never said anything about it until you’d said something about it, did he? And you’re only guessing, aren’t you? You don’t really know what he’s got on his mind at all! It could be part of a plan to let us show him exactly where our lads are. How do we know there isn’t a whole tribe of his lot following us at a safe distance? It’s been done before, hasn’t it? Once we’ve got him safely inside, who’s to know he won’t escape and get back to ’em, and then you can stand by for the rapid mortar fire, and no mistake. I mean, how do we know, eh?’
These were all rhetorical questions, stemming from unnamed fears. How do you defeat fear caused by lack of intelligent understanding, how do you do it? How did they conquer mumbo-jumbo, which often, it seems, is nothing more sinister than a lack of the necessary intelligence to make mental progressions. Cliff had it, whatever it was, an unreasoning fear of the unknown. How could I reason with him? But then, how did I know that what he was saying was not accurate? After all, if I gave in and believed him, I had nothing to lose but the burden of Helmut.
Looking at Helmut, wrapped in his improvised bandage, his strength leaving him as fast as the blood had left his punctured cheek, I could not consider him a potential danger. Rather did I know that, if we didn’t get him back to our medical orderlies quickly, he’d become a liability, and as such a potential danger. But there was, there could be, no aggressive intent left in him. How could I explain that to Cliff, if he couldn’t see it for himself?
He didn’t wait for me to try.
He took up the half-stooped stance Tom Cooper had used, and ran, then crawled, across the field. Tom Cooper turned round in surprise as Cliff drew near, and they began to talk earnestly. I could see they were discussing Helmut, and it appeared to me that there was no disagreement in Tom Cooper for whatever Cliff proposed.
Helmut, too, was aware of what was going on. He looked at me, on the edges, or so it seemed, of entreaty.
Quickly, I signalled him to his feet, and we too went scampering up the field, to drop down and crawl to where Tom Cooper and Cliff were talking. As we drew near, they stopped.
‘What the bloody hell are you playing at?’ Tom Cooper asked, with justifiable anger.
‘We felt lonely back there,’ I answered, as flippantly as I could manage, ‘knowing all the important talking was going on up here.’
He knew I would have nothing to do with any Star Chamber justice… and was counting on his sense of fairness. The struggle went on in him for perhaps a half a minute, for though we both had an equally low opinion of Cliff’s reasoning ability, he, at least, was one of us.
‘No, Cliff, we put it to the vote, and that’s that!’ he said. I was by no means certain enough of myself and Helmut to feel a sense of victory, but at least we had avoided taking a step backwards.
Tom Cooper beckoned to us, and we started our advance again, in the same pattern, Tom Cooper crawling first, Cliff after him eight yards to the rear and to the left, then Helmut to the rear and to Cliff’s right, then me to Helmut’s left rear.
We had gone over the crest of the hill, over the fold, and about a hundred yards down the slope of the field, when we came to a crevice in the ground. We stayed in formation, for the crevice’s edge was washed free of vegetation. Tom Cooper went down the crevice and across the other side, then Cliff went down it. Helmut went to the crevice’s edge, and then there was a sudden crack.
Some sounds you recognise instantly – the stirring sound made by a spoon in a cup, the frying of bacon in a pan, the snap of a twig in a wood. Many sounds caused their own purely instinctive reaction – I always become thirsty when I hear a spoon in a cup in the morning, become hungry when I hear bacon frying, stand perfectly still when I hear a twig snap in a wood lest I miss the all-too-infrequently-seen animal that snapped it.
This particular sound has always galvanised me to instant action. It was the explosion of a fuse in a grenade, the explosion that comes when the handle is let fly. Seven seconds later, that crack is followed by the major explosion. If you have heard the crack, you will be too near when the inevitable explosion comes.